Memeorandum

September 15, 2018

Andrew Sullivan on Conservatism

When he's good he's excellent - Andrew Sullivan bashes both parties while reprising the history of conservatism in America and trying to figure out what his for, not just what he is against..

I'll highlight this, from his Big Finish:

I also believe we need to slow the pace of demographic and cultural change. It is happening too fast, even for America, to sustain our society’s coherence and cohesion. The elite indifference to mass immigration — especially the illegal kind — is an ugly pact between Republican elites, eager for cheap, exploitable labor, and Democratic elites, who cynically encourage it because they think it will give them a reliable voting bloc. When the foreign-born population is at a proportion last seen in 1910, and as the raw numbers are higher than ever before, it is not inherently racist to seek to slow the pace to integrate the newcomers better, to defuse racial conflict and resentment. A nation has to mean something; to survive, it needs a conservative weaving of past, present, and future, as Burke saw it. And you cannot do that if you see this country as a blight on the face of the earth and an instrument of eternal oppression; or if you replace a healthy, self-critical patriotism with an ugly, racist nationalism that aims to restore the very worst of this country’s past, rather than preserve its extraordinary and near-unique achievements.

I know there’s no place for this in our current political climate. And that is why I believe this country is in as grave a crisis as any since the 1850s. Without a healthy conservatism, liberalism will degenerate. Without liberalism, conservatism has no inheritance to defend. And both rich veins in Western moderation are now under assault from the ideological left and the authoritarian right. We have to brave this pincer attack, conservatives and liberals together, or we will die together.

Randy Andy is precisely 50% more rational than his fellow sodomite Barry.
Whereas Barry constantly proposes two utter strawmen and sagely pretends to choose the rational middle, Sullivan posits only one totally false characterization and sagely poses himself, at least on the map of reality, but still in an indefensible spot of false moderation.
That's what gives him the conceit of ever calling himself a conservative.

I'd say that they pretend to be, boris. I've never seen much in terms of actions to back up that statement. Kasich voted for the assault weapons ban. Nothing ideological about that. They're simply con men...

This should not be a surprise, but apparently it is, and food execs are attributing this to their genius revamping and marketing.

I wold say the likely reasons include the following:

1. Retirees tired of always cooking and wanting something quick.
2. Singles tired and not wanting to spend the money to ear out after a long workday.
3. Teens looking for something hot to eat after school.
4. Almost every home having a microwave.

--or if you replace a healthy, self-critical patriotism with an ugly, racist nationalism that aims to restore the very worst of this country’s past, rather than preserve its extraordinary and near-unique achievements--

Surely TM doesn't see that as a reasonable description of Trump or Trump voters.
The nation has moved so far left, Trump's policies are not even as far right nor as nationalistic as the vast majority of FDR's or JFK's policies and they are certainly less racist.

The very worst of this country's past has already been restored by a foul Democratic party, that when faced with millions of escaped slaves who no longer did Dem bidding instituted Jim Crow to get them back on the plantation and when they were freed from Dem segregationists enticed them voluntarily back onto the Dem plantation of compliance and servitude with the family and independence destroying welfare state. Supposedly one of their own, Barry, proudly boasted of how many of his brothers and sisters he had enrolled in food stamps and medicaid. The supposedly racist Trump proudly boasts about how many have been freed from the grips of dependency and are now independent and in control of their own lives and are gainfully employed.

Newspeak and the suspension and denial of reality through prog propaganda was an evil Orwell was warning us about, not a template for how to look at politics.

#APEdited: AP loves editorial adjectives--@realDonaldTrump tweets PR officials told him 16 people died in Maria. Hours later AP repeats an earlier tweet, “Trump cast doubt on the storm's *widely accepted* death toll” as if popular makes it fact, not opinion.

Mad Jack, from previous thread, what boat were you competing in? We used to sail out of West River Yacht Club every year when they hosted their annual 505 Regatta. The smart ones tied empty milk jugs to the top of their masts so when (not if) they capsized, their mainsail wouldn’t turn black from the muck lining the Chesapeake. Great memories there.

Concur boris.
Marx, Hitler, Chomsky, Alinsky, et al are the flim flam men.
Their marks are not the rest of us normals but the insipid monkeys that gobble up the scam and swank about like they aren't the repulsive fools the rest of us see. Puffed up imbeciles like Roderick Spode...and Ben.

She casted ballots under the name of Angie Yadira Zamora in 2004 and 2012, according to the Chronicle. She also voted in the 2016 presidential election.

In August, 19 foreign nationals were indicted for voting in North Carolina. One of the indicted individuals allegedly voted in 16 elections in a period of nearly two decades, The Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported.

All but one of the 19 indicted voters registered to vote through the Department of Motor Vehicles through the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).

Public Interest Legal Foundation wrote in its study, “Safe Spaces,” that the NVRA made it easier for anybody to register to vote because there was no verification process in place.

Ohio Republican Rep. Bob Gibbs introduced a bill on Sept. 6 that would require people nationwide to show proof of citizenship, like a valid U.S. passport or birth certificate, when registering to vote.

I don't know anymore what was the correct attitude to Iraq, let the sanctions run down, let the succession go to uday and qusay. Were there wmds in Iraq probably, what condition were they in, the Salafi trend was proceeding space, this is something Silva admits sheepishly after 350 pages, they did have contacts with Sunni and Shia militants.

Continuing with that Wexner tantrum from the last thread, high roller turds like him continue to illustrate what Mike Huckabee said on Life, Liberty and Levin: that by having a self financed campaign, DJT owes nothing to the Uniparty money men who are responsible for getting tools like Ryan to toe the line and MYSTERIOUSLY back away from honoring the campaign promises that got them elected.

So take a hike, Wexner; and spend your filthy jack on some equally filthy whores.

Most of us probably remember the tv show Spenser For Hire, but it was based on a very readable group of books by the now deceased Robert B Parker.
I always thought avery brooks captured the essence of hawk superbly.
Posted by: rse | September 14, 2018 at 05:52 PM

rse - Here's another vote for the Spenser series. They are very readable, but with substance, as opposed to the readable fluff of John Grisham.
I thought Brooks was nearly perfect as Hawk, too. I enjoyed almost every book in the series.

I'm guessing most of us probably know Parker as the author of the Jesse Stone series of books that were made into some enjoyable TV movies starring Tom Selleck.

btw, the Spenser angle makes me a wholehearted supporter of the use of 'Judas Goat' as the appropriate name for one who is used to lead others to their demise.

- - - - - -

I've read 18 on the list - and started another eight to ten that I just could not force myself to suffer through, or simply waste the time to finish.
What strikes me as odd is the purported nature of the list - "the list of America's 100 most-loved books" - given the greatly-loved books by some of our greatest authors who are *not* on the list.
The list strikes me as having been filtered through an NPR-approved PC list of authors.

Sullivan concedes that there is reason for concern, but then he goes to procrustean lengths to craft a reasonable response which is a straw man.

If we saw what we wanted to see with chalabi, the left and some of the unchastened right saw wael as their standard bearer, the fact Kirkpatrick still doesn't any better perspective, well that's on him.

Probably one of the worst bathhouse billionaires. As was discussed here awhile back, that slime ball, Epstein, made most of his money investing for Wexner and ended up with Werner’s beater 727 that became the Lolita Express. Buckeye has stories of O$U insemination sessions because ol Wex couldn’t stand touching his beard.

Katshit vetoed a relatively market based health care plan in order to impose Medicaid expansion in Ohio. He's ideologically aligned with the Pearly Gates theory of whatever casuistry makes that goof feel righteous at any time.

With the availability of BLUE CHIP TALENT like Katshit, Ryan, Flake and Corker, Egg McMuffin will have to strive mightily to get the Rear Admiral's valued endorsement reflecting the rock ribbed conservative values of the Shuffleboard Army on the Lido Deck of the Sea Cuck.

I understand catcher in the rye, a little better that a know what Salinger was going through during the wat I recall when I first entered middle school they offered another teen angst tale, the chocolate war, what purpose waa that about.

People eating more frozen dinners is a natural effect of a booming economy. Those who have joined or rejoined the workforce in the last year and a half obviously have less free time and more available money than they did under Obama. That means they can splurge on Eggo waffles and real maple syrup for breakfast instead of pinching pennies by eating oatmeal or toast, and the same goes for dinner.

William Jacobson of LI has started to clearly see the light. He's thoughtful and cautious in his opinions, and to have him pen this should help peel the scales from some eyes...

'You have seen the ugly face of #TheResistance, and if you think it’s just about a judicial nomination, you haven’t been paying attention. They treated Kavanaugh the way they treat conservatives, Republicans and the deplorables. This isn’t about Brett Kavanaugh.'

The thing is in part neocons habe forgotten their own history, direct military intervention is the last response after all others,have failed, political, economic then proxy support all underlay a successful strategy for steering a target country,

Reagan didn't threaten to invade Nicaragua or cross the fulda ago, quite the opposite, the response to Libya was instructive.

OK, the Spenser series? I'm triggered now.
The early books were excellent genre pieces. However, as the series progressed the late great Robert Parker fell in love with his characters, who stood around swapping salad recipes, flexing their muscles, and ruminating on what it meant to be a man and whether they were superb specimens of manhood or awesome specimens of manhood.
Got kind of tiresome.
Go with Jack Reacher (Lee Child) or Davenport, Flowers (John Sandford).

I've been working on this for a little while. I think it's something that many of you may be aware of, but, perhaps, not in the full context. It's important to understand just how bad the 2007-2008 financial crisis was.

If you've ever heard of the term "repo", you may associate it with cars being picked up in the middle of the night and returned to the custody of the banks who made the loan.

But it also occurs in another connotation, a "repo" also refers to a financial product/transaction known as a "repurchase agreement", or "repo", for short. A "repo" is an agreement between a bank/securities firm and a customer. The customer proffers a bond/collateral to a securities firm which then loans money to the customer. The "repurchase" part of the agreement is that the customer agrees to buy back the collateral the next day at a price agreed to in the "repurchase agreement." That price will include an imputed interest rate. If agreed by both parties, it can be rolled over to the next day.

This not a new financial product. It's been around for more than a hundred years. Kind of a backwater. The market did grow much larger when things like home loans, car loans, credit cards, and other things were securitized into bonds back in the 80's. More bonds = more collateral = more "repos".

"Gorton: In the last 30 or 40 years, there have been a number of fundamental changes in our economy. One of the most fundamental of these has been the rise of institutional investing. The amount of money under management of institutional investors has just been exponentially increasing. These include pension funds, mutual funds, large money managers. And these institutions basically have a need for a checking account, if you will. So if you’re a large institutional money manager, you may need a place to put $200 million, and you want it to earn interest and to be safe and accessible. That led to the metamorphosis of a very old security: the sale and repurchase (or “repo”) market. Like a check, repo had been around for perhaps 100 years, but it was never very large."

So we have lots of institutions that are willing to loan overnight. But they want great collateral - in olden days that meant US government bonds which limited the size of this grey market. Now add in the new-fangled securitized debt bonds rated AAA or BBB and we have more available collateral. More money, more collateral and the market expands.

"Gorton: Right. Let’s just review how repo operates. For repo to work, firms that want to borrow cash (to finance their activities) must hold a sufficient amount of bonds on their balance sheets to be used as collateral when depositors (effectively lenders: money market mutual funds, other institutional investors or corporations seeking a place to save large quantities of cash in the short term) arrive to put their money in the “bank”—the firm wanting to borrow cash. In the example I used earlier, the “bank” was Lehman Brothers, but most financial firms using repo didn’t collapse as dramatically as Lehman did."
So those bonds, if they’re securitization bonds, asset-backed securities, they are linked to what were portfolios of bank loans. Because of this link, traditional banking and shadow banking are integrated. They’re part of the same system. Traditional banking funds itself in large part by selling loans to firms that use those loans for collateral for this other category of loans.

Stepping back in time, before we had federal money, banks printed up their own dollars. Bring them to a merchant who knows the bank and he/she will accept them at face value. Bring in dollars from an out of state bank and the merchant is going to go off and consult some valuation book to see what they're worth, maybe he only offers a "haircut" of 95 cents on the dollar.

So you've got an inefficient system of money that is information sensitive. If you know more than the other guy what that dollar is really worth you gain from the transaction. The old phrase "bad money drive out good money" holds. You spend bad money, hang onto the good money and eventually only bad money is in circulation. Federal money changed that.

US government bonds had a known value. Corporate bonds had known values and were rated by rating agencies that pored over the company's books. New classes of securitized bonds had known values and were rated by the same agencies.
Until, all of a sudden, they didn't. And we're back to asymetrical information. I might know more about a particular bond than you do. We can no longer accept the fiction that these bonds are all AAA.

"Gorton: Yes, the house price decline had the biggest impact on subprime mortgages, and that’s the information that was revealed by trading the ABX index, although I think it was widely known and understood, probably, beforehand. But the question is, again: How could that shock lead to such a big crisis?

Remember: At the time, subprime mortgages outstanding totaled about $1.5 trillion. If all of that had defaulted with zero recovery, that would not have been a global financial crisis. That would have been a problem, because poor and minority people received a disproportionate share of these subprime mortgages. And surely there were problems with all sorts of other things—underwriting standards, broker incentives—but they didn’t constitute or cause a global financial crisis. So what happened?

What happened, I think, is that the depositors in the repo market got nervous to the extent that the only way to protect themselves against agents producing private information was to ask for a buffer. Let’s go back to the repo market. In the repo market, I give you $100 million; you give me $100 million worth of bonds. Let’s say those bonds are AAA, credit-card-linked bonds, an asset-backed security. The only way I can lose as a depositor is if you fail. I am then allowed to unilaterally terminate the agreement, and I go to sell my bonds and I fetch less than $100 million.

Now, if the shock causes me to worry that when I sell my bonds somebody will have produced private information (because now, unlike before, it’s profitable to do that), then I can protect myself by saying, “I’m not going to give you $100 million. I’m only going to give you $80 million, and you give me $100 million of bonds as collateral.”

So that gives me a 20 percent buffer against that possible loss. For you, however, that’s a big problem because you were financing $100 million with me before and now you’re only financing $80 million, and so now you have to finance the other $20 million somewhere else.

Gorton: Right. This was the increase in haircuts. An increase in haircuts is a withdrawal from this banking system. There are several studies that allow us to put some numbers on this. With Andrew Metrick, I’ve estimated the size of the repo market; two economists at the BIS [Bank for International Settlements] have estimated the size of the repo market independently and in a separate way; and there’s an IMF [International Monetary Fund] economist who has also estimated the size of the repo market, again, with a third method. And we have another important piece of information, a very good survey of the European repo market, which is widely viewed as being much smaller than the U.S. market. So, if you look at all of this information, the size of the repo market, conservatively, was $10 trillion.

Region: This is just repo?

Gorton: Right, just repos. Never mind about asset-backed commercial paper or the rest of it.

Gorton: The total assets in the regulated banking sector in the U.S. are $10 trillion.

Above by me and from excerpts from the Gary Gorton interview referenced below. The next part from me and the Richmond Fed excerpts.

Shadow banking activities, on the other hand, faced no explicit government support and no safety and soundness regulation before the crisis. Runs on the system occurred in 2008 when “depositors” withdrew their funding from “banks.”
Because of the havoc that followed, the term “shadow banking” now has a generally negative connotation. Yet it remains a vital component of the financial system. The shadow banking system may have exceeded $20 trillion in liabilities at its peak, possibly doubling that of the traditional, regulated banking system. Today it stands somewhere around $15 trillion. Shadow banking is critical because it funds the traditional banking sector by purchasing loans from bank balance sheets. This allows banks to shed risk and extend additional credit. Without shadow banking, traditional banking likely would be much costlier for households and businesses."

"Banks found a way to finance themselves that was much more profitable than deposit taking and its associated costly regulatory requirements. They securitized the loans they made and sold them to eager investors, which shifted assets and associated risks off their balance sheets. Securitization was such a successful innovation that even nonbanks, like large corporations that issue credit cards or auto loans, used it."

So we've got more money willing to be invested in the "repo" market, more collateral and the market expands until it's as large, or larger than the combined assets of all US banks. In some ways it's like a checking account for institutions and corporations. And some companies used the short-term "repo" money to finance long-term bonds. The money was cheap, less than the cost of regular borrowing.

"Many borrowers were highly leveraged. Investment bank Lehman Brothers, for example, maintained $700 billion of assets and corresponding liabilities on capital of about $25 billion. A large portion of those assets were long-term investments that could not easily be sold if cash were needed, yet Lehman, like others, chose to fund them largely through short-term repo markets since copious demand for
short-term investments made that funding source cheap. In 2008 Lehman would sometimes roll over $200 billion of its balance sheet each day in repos."

That's a leverage ratio of 28:1.

"How was the breakdown of repo markets like a bank run?
Repo lenders face a daily decision to roll over the investment — that is, to not “withdraw” their funds from the shadow banking system. The more repo lenders withdraw, the more likely the borrower is to become insolvent and default, leaving lenders with the collateral. Yet if repo lenders begin to not want or trust the collateral, their version of deposit insurance, they’ll be more likely to withdraw their investment. If this self re-enforcing cycle escalates, lenders have no choice but to withdraw or risk being the last one standing and holding potentially devalued collateral.
Here’s how this played out during the fall of 2008: On rumors of severe housing exposure and potential failure, Lehman Brothers’ counterparties refused to roll over the investments that funded its operations. This created a panic. Investors were uncertain which large institutions — many of which they or their counterparties had extended loans to — could face a funding crisis next. Yet mounting subprime defaults also made investors doubt the value of the collateral that was supposed to make them whole. Repo lenders began requiring larger and larger haircuts as insurance. Repo borrowers were forced to sell other assets in order to provide the haircuts. As the panic wore on, more and more assets were sold and their prices dropped, requiring the borrowers to sell still more, dropping their prices further. Collateral became worth less and less until repo lenders stopped lending entirely. That took away a major ultimate funding source for virtually all types of economic activity, all within a matter of days."

Those decisions were taken out of the hands of the "repo" desk by the Risk Management Committees at all of the financial institutions. Nobody wanted to have "bad" collateral dumped on them and then not have it be repurchased. There just wasn't enough time available to set up the now required research to evaluate whole classes of securitized debt. If somebody knew the real value of a bond - and you didn't - it could take down the whole firm. Asymetrical information.